U.N. Says Food Plan Could Cost $30 Billion a Year

By ANDREW MARTIN and ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: June 4, 2008

Faced with an immediate hunger crisis and the need to double food production in the next 30 years, world leaders meeting Tuesday to discuss soaring food prices were mostly in agreement on how the problem could be resolved. The questions were how to get there and who was going to pay for it.

The steps needed? Immediately deliver more food aid to the world's hungry. Provide small farmers with seeds and fertilizer. Scrap export bans and restrictions. And vastly increase agriculture research and outreach programs to improve crop production.

The cost? Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the host of the meeting, estimated it could run to $30 billion a year.

''The problem of food insecurity is a political one,'' he said. ''It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it is those choices made by governments that determine the allocation of resources.''

As expected, biofuels emerged as the most contentious issue of the conference, and several speakers criticized government policies that diverted food crops to energy use, particularly at a time of increasing hunger.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt called for ''an urgent international dialogue'' on the food crisis that ''sets standards for the responsible utilization of agricultural crops as food for human beings, not as fuel for human beings.'' He suggested that biofuel production be restricted to agricultural waste and nonfood crops.

Brazil's president, Luiz In?o Lula da Silva, also took a swipe at the United States' ethanol production, saying that corn-based ethanol could ''obviously only compete with sugar-cane ethanol when it is shot up with subsidies and shielded behind tariff barriers.''

Brazil and the United States are the world's largest producers of ethanol. Most of Brazil's ethanol comes from sugar cane and most in the United States comes from corn.

''There is good ethanol and bad ethanol,'' he said, adding that ethanol from sugar cane was far more energy efficient than corn ethanol. ''Good ethanol helps clean up the planet and is competitive. Bad ethanol comes with the fat of subsidies.''

The United States' agriculture secretary, Ed Schafer, who attended the meeting, dismissed the criticism, saying Brazil could be planting food crops like corn and soybeans on the acres it devotes to sugar cane from ethanol.

''They're choosing to grow sugar cane, and we choose to grow corn,'' said Mr. Schafer, who maintains that ethanol has played a minor role in food inflation. ''I don't understand the distinction.''

The three-day conference drew dozens of world leaders, like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan, to discuss food security. Food prices are at their highest in more than three decades and stockpiles are at perilous lows.

The reasons for the rise in food prices include weather problems that reduced crop yields, growing demand for food among the emerging middle class in China and other developing countries, and the increasing production of ethanol and other biofuels.

Among the more provocative speakers was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who blamed the Western nations for creating the food crisis by devaluing the dollar and forcing up oil prices, and described Israel as a criminal state.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe criticized his nation's former ''colonial masters'' in Britain and its Western allies for imposing what he called illegal economic sanctions.

''All this has been done to cripple Zimbabwe's economy and thereby effect illegal regime change in our country,'' he said. Zimbabwe's once thriving agricultural sector has virtually collapsed during his tenure.

But for all the diversions, the main theme of the speakers on Tuesday was to vastly increase support for agriculture to provide more food for poor countries and future generations.

Mr. Diouf of the Food and Agriculture Organization sharply criticized wealthy nations for cutting spending on agricultural programs for the world's poor, while spending billions of dollars on carbon markets, subsidies for their own farmers, weapons and biofuel production.

''The developing countries did, in fact, forge policies, strategies and programs that -- if they had received appropriate funding -- would have given us world food security,'' Mr. Diouf said, adding that countries had finally mobilized to help only after images of food riots and hunger emerged in the news media.

The World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, in his prepared remarks, said: ''This is not a natural catastrophe. It is man-made and can be fixed by us. It does not take complex research. We know what has to be done. We just need action and resources in real time.''

At a meeting devoted largely to the economics of food, dominated by talk of biofuels and genetically modified crops, many charitable groups said they felt their more basic concerns were overlooked.

Susan Shepherd of Doctors Without Borders said that in Niger, where she has worked for the past few years, higher prices meant that families bought less food -- or less nutritious food -- for their children. ''The only one who really focused on hunger and malnutrition -- about the people who go hungry -- was the pope,'' she said, referring to a message from Pope Benedict XVI that was read at the conference.

PHOTO: Aid workers gave bread to Pakistanis in Lahore last month. Food shortages have led to unrest in a number of countries.(PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS)